Mark Murphy: Reflections on a Dawg day afternoon in Jacksonville

The University of Georgia and the University of Florida have been playing college football for over a century now. The game has traditionally been played in Jacksonville, the sprawling north Florida city that crouches on the banks of the meandering St. John’s River. In 1564, a group of French explorers established a colony at Fort Caroline, also on the banks of the St. Johns River near the site of modern-day Jacksonville. Alas, the French settlement was short-lived: Spanish soldiers slaughtered almost all of them in 1565, finishing off any remaining Frenchmen at a site now called Matanzas Inlet, south of St. Augustine. The inlet’s name is appropriate, for the Spanish word “matanzas” means … slaughter.

This past Saturday, another slaughter occurred on the banks of the St. John’s River. The Georgia Bulldogs, my undergraduate alma mater, obliterated the Florida Gators 42-7, in a game that was not even as close as the score.

To the uninitiated, this comparison may seem a tad hyperbolic. After all, it’s only college football, right?

Folks from up North are often huge fans of their professional sports teams — and with good reason. The Boston Celtics, New York Yankees and Pittsburgh Steelers are legendary franchises in their respective sports. But Southerners didn’t even have a true professional sports franchise until the mid-1960s, when the Atlanta Braves, Falcons and Hawks and the Miami Dolphins first appeared on the scene — and most of those teams, with sporadic exceptions, have been about as consistently bland as tapioca pudding. As a result, Southerners just don’t get all that excited about professional sports.

By contrast, allegiance to collegiate athletics runs high in the South. College football, in particular, has been a defining force in Southern culture, with a near-religious fanaticism that sometimes borders on insanity. For many Southern families, fall Saturdays are defined by two things: The college football schedule and the hunting season. Any major social event must take these factors into account, or suffer the consequences. I’ll give you a personal example: Twenty years ago this month, my brother and his wife were married in Atlanta on the day of the Georgia-Florida game. The groomsmen were mortified, but we adapted. We bought a small television at Circuit City and watched the game in the back of the church — at least until the wedding planner found us, hissing “Get out there and do your job.”

Georgia (with current Georgia coach Kirby Smart playing free safety) won that game, by the way, thrashing the Gators 37-17 to break a seven-year losing streak. And that’s how I can always remember which year my brother was married.

The Georgia-Florida game is relatively unique in college football in that it is played at an allegedly “neutral” site, even though that site sits squarely in Florida territory. The stadium is divided in half, straight down the middle, with half of the raucous crowd of 82,000 being dressed in Georgia’s beautiful red and black and the other half attired in Florida’s hideous orange and blue. Historically, it’s been a big old party, especially for those of us in south Georgia. In fact, the game has long been referred to as the “World’s Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party.” Former Florida linebacker Scot Brantley recalls the crowd being so pickled by kickoff that he could actually smell the alcohol in the air, saying, “I was getting ready to be introduced and as I was coming out onto the field, the strong smell of bourbon hit my head.” Legendary Georgia announcer Larry Munson, after Georgia beat Florida 26-21 in the 1980 national championship season on a 93-yard touchdown pass from Buck Belue to Lindsay Scott, famously said, “You know this game has always been called the World’s Greatest Cocktail Party. Do you know what’s gonna happen here tonight? And up at Saint Simons and Jekyll Island and all those places where all those Dawg people have got those condominiums for four days? Man, is there going to be some property destroyed tonight!”

Former Georgia coach Vince Dooley, who is in the College Football Hall of Fame, used to own the Gators. He had a 17-8-1 record against Florida, including winning 14 of the last 19 games of his tenure. A Dooley-coached team ruined Steve Spurrier’s Heisman trophy-winning season at Florida with a 27-10 beat-down of the previously unbeaten Gators. Dooley’s 1985 team throttled the first Florida team to ever be ranked No. 1 by a 24-3 score. By the end of the Dooley era, Georgia enjoyed a commanding 43-22-2 lead in the series.

But then, Steve Spurrier returned to Gainesville as the Gators’ “head ball coach.”

The greatest player in Florida football history to that point ultimately became its greatest coach, as well — and a large part of his success had to do with reversing the Gators’ losing ways against Georgia. Spurrier compiled an 11-1 record against the hated Bulldogs — and reversed decades of Gator frustration. Since Spurrier’s first season in 1990, the Gators have dominated their rivals to the North, winning 21 of the previous 27 games before this past Saturday.

But the world keeps turning, friends. Order has a way of asserting itself. After a failed stint in the NFL and a decade of of relative Gator exile in Columbia, S.C., Steve Spurrier is back in Gainesville. They made up some bogus job for him so they could pay him to schmooze with alumni and conjure up memories of his Gator glory days in order to generate contributions to the university. So Spurrier was in Jacksonville on Saturday, roaming the sidelines and trying to whip up support for the Gators like a good ambassador is supposed to do.

“If we can find a way to beat Georgia, we’re right in the middle of winning another Eastern Division,” Spurrier said last week.

Alas, the hallucinogens Spurrier must have had coursing through his veins when he made that statement had all worn off by the end of the first quarter in Jacksonville last weekend. Georgia led 21-0 by that point. Reality swam up and chomped hard on the Old Ball Coach’s whatchamacallit. And before the weekend was out, the Gators would fire Head Coach Jim McElwain.

So forgive me if I take a moment to savor the end of an accursed era. Just as Spurrier returned to his alma mater to right a sinking ship 27 years ago, so favorite son Smart has returned to Athens in order to exorcise the demons wrought by Spurrier’s evil genius. And it looks like Smart’s exorcism may be working.

Of course, everything that goes around comes around. The late October bacchanal of the WLOCP will be back next season with one new coach, a fresh batch of speculation and an all-new storyline. By this time next season, the drama of this past weekend will be old news, recycled only to build up excitement for that year’s contest.

But I’ll still revel in one small mental image: A brief glimpse of Steve Spurrier, sitting alone in the press box after the Bulldogs’ massacre of his beloved Gators on the storied banks of the St. John’s River. Sulking, his chin in his hands.